Tricia was smiling wryly at this news, but Sam paled and whispered, “Oh, my.”
It made Allie suspect the woman hadn’t had children yet and she completely understood her distress. That experience had been enough to make her kind of glad she hadn’t had children herself and that she had Liam. Not that she still couldn’t have them, physically, but constantly being on the run with Liam wasn’t likely to lead to her meeting anyone she might want to have children of her own with.
“Liam was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen when he finally showed up.” Allie smiled. “I insisted Stella stay with me for a while so that I could help look after him while she healed from the birth. She was seriously exhausted and pale by the time it was over. She was also incredibly cranky and basically ordered me to take the baby and leave her alone. I just thought that was the crankiness until she said I smelled like dinner to her and unless that’s what I wanted to be I should leave at once.” She grimaced at the memory. “Since her fangs were out, I took her at her word, scooped up little Liam, and hurried upstairs and then just paced around rocking him. It was probably fifteen minutes later that I heard the front door open and close. It was Stella leaving. I couldn’t believe she was up and about already, but she obviously needed blood, so I just continued to rock Liam. Stella returned a couple hours later and, I swear, looking at her, you wouldn’t believe she’d just been through what she had. She looked completely fine, her old self. Well, except that her stomach was completely flat again, and I know that wouldn’t happen with a mortal,” she added wryly.
“Immortals heal much more quickly than mortals,” Magnus explained solemnly.
Allie merely nodded. “Stella stayed with me for the next week, and then returned to the town house across the street so that I could work without Liam’s crying to distract me, which I appreciated. We still spent a lot of time together, and I watched Liam for her while she went out in search of a blood donor most nights, but by the start of the second week of February I was in a crunch with work. I had two deadlines for the fifteenth and was stressed out, so she insisted on taking Liam with her on her nightly outings for the next week, which I thought was just crazy. You can’t take a baby to a bar,” she pointed out. “But she said she’d go to one of the coffee shops that were open all night or something and insisted it would be fine and I could look after Liam for her again once I finished my projects.”
Allie fell silent briefly then, stealing herself against what she had to recall next. But finally, she said, “It was the fourteenth of February. I had finished one of the projects, which removed a lot of pressure, and I was nearly done the second, so I decided to give myself a break and stop early that night and finish up the next. Well, early for me,” she added wryly. “It was around eleven thirty when I shut down the computer and went downstairs to grab something for dinner. It was maybe midnight when Stella showed up at the door. She’d obviously just returned from town. She said they’d found her, removed Liam’s receiving blanket, passed him off to me, and pulled out a doll that she wrapped the blanket around instead. She also gave me her necklace—” Allie touched her chest where the locket was now hidden under her blouse “—and reminded me of my promise to look after Liam if anything happened to her, and then she was gone.
“I peeked through the blinds and watched her walk across the street to her town house pushing Liam’s carriage, and then she went in, and before the door was quite closed, the town house exploded and burst into flames.” Allie paused to clear her throat and blinked a couple times to try to shift the liquid gathering in her eyes. “At first I thought maybe it was a trick to make the vampires think she was dead. That she’d somehow caused the explosion that quickly. I mean, she could move so fast when she wanted to. Scary fast,” she recalled with a disbelieving shake of the head.
Stella had hidden that speed from her at first, but once Allie knew about her, she hadn’t bothered to hide it anymore and she was always stunned at the speed she could manage. Sighing, Allie continued. “I thought, or at least hoped, that she’d rushed out the back door to escape it. But the door hadn’t quite closed, and swung back open after the explosion. Stella stumbled to the entrance in flames, the doll still clutched to her chest. She stood there for maybe two or three seconds and then turned and just collapsed into the flames.”
“The rogues blew up her house?” Sam gasped with horror. “But I thought the sire wanted the baby if it was a boy? Why would he kill both of them that way?”
“Liam was not killed,” Tricia reminded her. “The baby Stella carried was a doll.”
“But they couldn’t know Stella would leave Liam with Allie,” Tybo pointed out. “They could have killed both of them with that explosion.”
“Which is why I don’t think the vampires caused the explosion,” Allie said now.
Everyone at the table turned to her and everyone but Magnus’s expression became concentrated on her forehead. She wasn’t surprised when Tricia exclaimed, “You think Stella set up the house to explode when she walked in. You think she sacrificed herself in the hopes of saving Liam.”
Seven
Allie read the disbelief on the faces of the people around the table and pointed out, “She had a doll to substitute for Liam, gave me her child, and reminded me of my promise to take care of him if anything happened to her. She then gave me the necklace she never took off, to give to him when he was older. She knew she was going to die,” Allie said with certainty, and then told them what she’d decided after years of pondering it. “Stella must have set up something long ago to make the house blow up. Maybe even when she first moved in. She probably planned to be going out the back door with her baby as the house blew up, and maybe even hoped to catch some of the vampires in the explosion.”
“You think her friendship with you changed her plans,” Tricia murmured, her gaze concentrated on her forehead. “That she decided Liam would have a better chance at a halfway normal life if the vampires actually saw her and what they would have thought was him die.”
“Yes,” Allie sighed. “But . . . I think she was suffering a bad case of postpartum depression too. I mean, before Liam was born, Stella used to struggle with the things she’d done when she was first turned. But after he was born . . .” Allie shook her head. “Stella loved him so much. She called him her little angel, but she started saying things like he’d probably be better off without having a monster like her for a mother.”
“As an immortal she couldn’t have been suffering postpartum depression,” Sam said quietly. “It was just her conscience and her belief that she was now a vampire that was tormenting her. The sad thing is if we’d known about her we could have told her what she really was and helped her deal with it.”
“She had killed mortals,” Lucian reminded Sam. “If we had known about her, she would have been put down as a rogue.”
“Oh. Yes, of course,” Sam said, but frowned at the realization as he turned to spear Allie with a look.
“Did you see the vam—” Lucian began, but stopped abruptly as he started to say vampires. Shock and then disgust crossed his face before he said, “Did you see the rogues she said had found her?”